So, here you are/ too foreign for home/ too foreign for here./ Never enough for both.

— Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

The Carthography of Waiting

This project was born from an image. One day my gaze was captured by a TV screen that showed a group of people trying to pass through a fence, that separates the spanish territory from Morocco. This people, even though they where hanging precariously from the upper edge of the fence, they had an upright posture, full of dignity. They had been waiting for eight hours, trying to enter Spain, fighting against the wind and the exhaustion. ¿What were the autorities waiting to help them?

From this reflection I made a cross mark in the map of the southern border of Spain, specifically in Melilla, city-wall that divides África from Spain, and it´s a “border from borders, build upon a fascinating fusion of conflict and alliances: Spain and Marroc, Christianity and Islam, Europe and África, UE territory and non UE territory, opulent north and impoverished south, ancient settler and ancient colonized”. Javier Ferrer

In this project I made a fieldwork outside the Provisional Centre of Immigrants in Melilla (C.E.T.I.), and I centered my work method in storytelling and the drawing of subjetive maps, with the intention of giving a voice to the inmigrants, and enrich the media discourse. Also with the aim of confronting the map concept as an objective reality. With the material I developed an art book, that rides between the artistic and the documentary, with a first-person narration that intertwine photographies, testimonials, drawings, photos and poems.